Research Teams Archives - Social Science Matrix

Matrix Welcomes New Research Teams for 2025-2026

Published July 10, 2025

Social Science Matrix is proud to welcome eight new Matrix Research Teams — three faculty-led teams and five graduate student-led teams — for the 2025-2026 academic year. Matrix Research Teams are groups of scholars who gather regularly to explore or develop a novel question or emerging field in the social sciences. The teams convene participants from multiple disciplines and focus on research questions with real-world significance; they are designed to encourage collaboration, provide professional development, and create opportunities for faculty engagement and mentorship.

This year’s funded teams will address a wide spectrum of social science topics. The faculty-led projects will focus on such issues as applying the concept of the “commons” to the social challenges of climate change; developing a database of letters sent in 19th-century Libya; and investigating the use of filmmaking as a methodological and epistemological tool in the social sciences.

The student-led teams will address such topics as how expert networks have shaped industrial policy and infrastructure development in East and Southeast Asia; how global capitalism can be made comprehensible through critical study; using personal narratives to understand and improve the experience of Latinx students at UC Berkeley; developing a research framework for understanding farmworker vulnerabilities; and understanding the recent rise of cyberlibertarianism, venture capital extremism, and techno-authoritarianism.

“Matrix Research Teams are central to the mission of Social Science Matrix to promote cross-disciplinary conversations and innovative social science research,” says Cori Hayden, Professor of Anthropology and Interim Faculty Director of Social Science Matrix. “We look forward to welcoming this year’s teams and helping them explore important social science questions from new, diverse perspectives.”

“It’s incredibly rewarding to create a space where these scholars can push their disciplinary boundaries and address critical, real-world challenges,” adds Sarah Harrington, Program Manager for Social Science Matrix.

Matrix Research Teams are chosen following review by a cross-disciplinary panel of faculty members. Faculty-led teams receive $5000 in funding and hold regular meetings focused on a defined research problem, with a goal to apply for one or more grants for continued research. The student-led teams will receive up to $1500 to explore a new area or question of inquiry, in part to assess whether it has potential for further investigation. In addition to funding, all Matrix Research Teams receive support in coordinating, scheduling, and reserving space for meetings and events. Matrix also provides communications support to help publicize each group’s work, as well as assistance with identifying and applying for further funding.

Below are summaries describing the 2025-2026 Matrix Research Teams, with abstracts provided by the teams in their proposals.

Faculty-Led Research Teams

Commons and Property in the Climate Crisis Research Team

Team leads: Matthew Shutzer, Assistant Professor, Department of History; Chandana Anusha, C.W. Fellow, Department of Geography; Oliver Cussen, C.W. Fellow, Department of Geography

The planetary crisis has revived an interest in the past and future of “the commons,” where social relations and natural resources are governed outside the logic of the market and without the regulation of the state. Whereas the commons have typically been associated with delimited spaces and organizations, such as the agrarian village or local guilds, contemporary research explores the possibility of thinking about the commons on the scale of oceans, the species, or the planet. This Matrix Research Team will bring cutting edge research into dialogue with established debates on the commons to interrogate a central research question: To what extent do historical, existing, and imagined examples of the commons—from the precapitalist village, the urban commune, or the global commons—offer models for sustainable and democratic forms of social ecology in an era of accelerated land grabs, resource extraction, and anthropogenic climate change? The team will bring together researchers from Geography, History, Anthropology, Legal and Political Theory, and English Literature, each currently working on projects that explore the relationship between property, nature, and accumulation across different sites and periods. Our scales of analysis will move from the agrarian to the oceanic, subterranean to the atmospheric, built environments to the non-human world, and regional to the planetary. By sketching out the regimes, fantasies, and memories that drive the making and unmaking of commons, we hope that our conversations will contribute to policy-making on one of the biggest natural resource questions of our time.

Letters of the Sahara: Towards a digital toolkit for mapping language change, social networks, and units of exchange in the nineteenth-century Arabic correspondence to/from Ghadames (Libya)

Team leads: Bruce Hall, Associate Professor, Department of History; Adam Benkato, Associate Professor, Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures (MELC)

As imported European paper became cheaper and more easily obtainable in the Sahara Desert and its hinterlands in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the practice of letter-writing grew enormously. As in other parts of the world, letter-writing made it possible for distance to be bridged in new ways, drawing far-flung people into circuits of information exchange. Our project seeks to explore how letter-writing in this period contributed to broader economic historical changes in commercial practices associated with trans-Saharan trade, availability of credit, recoverability of debt and inheritances. Writing in Arabic also accelerated processes of Arabization of Berber- and sub-Saharan language-speaking communities in the region and as such, letters are a key index of new forms of literacy among non-elite people and broader language change.
There are thousands of extant Arabic letters across the circum-Saharan region, almost all of them produced since the second half of the eighteenth century. Some are held in public archives but many more remain in private family collections. Very few have been published. Our project aims to develop digital and database tools to create better datasets from the contents of the letters so that they can be used in social scientific research. We will focus on one set of letters sent to/from the ancient northern Saharan town of Ghadames, in modern-day Libya. A significant oasis town since Roman times, communities of merchants from Ghadames wrote letters to/from important trading towns such as Tripoli, Tunis, Kano, and Timbuktu, from when letters can be found today.

Filmmaking as a Social Science Method: Research Team

Team leads: Natalia Brizuela, Professor, Departments of Film & Media and Spanish & Portuguese, UC Berkeley; Naomi Etsehiywot, PhD Student, Department of African-American and African Diaspora Studies

This interdisciplinary research group investigates the use of filmmaking as a methodological and epistemological tool in the social sciences, proposing an expanded approach to the study of social phenomena. Firmly situated in the historical development of global capitalism and Western hegemony, film production has long been a medium for both reflecting and disrupting power and ideology, offering insights into economies of representation. By critically engaging with the aesthetic dimensions of filmmaking—such as composition, lighting, editing, and sound—our research group asks how visual representation constructs, destabilizes, and amplifies the ideological and relational dynamics embedded in traditional social science methods like ethnography and participant observation. Drawing from feminist, Black, and postcolonial studies, and their critical insights into the power dynamics of representation, our group explores how film can interrogate the affective and sensory dimensions of our questions around migration, humanitarianism, urban transformation, and racialized subjectivities. Through this lens, we position filmmaking as a methodology for interrogating the distribution of human value across populations, and a unique medium for relating to our objects of study and traditional social science techniques. Our research not only contributes to evolving qualitative methodologies in the social sciences, but also advances the potential of visual media to (re)shape academic discourse and foster deeper understanding of global social issues.

Graduate Student-led Research Teams

Asian Infrastructures and Expert Networks Research Team

Team lead: Aaditee Kudrimoti, PhD student, Department of City & Regional Planning

The Asian Infrastructures and Expert Networks team will investigate how expert networks have historically contributed to the successful implementation of industrial policy and large-scale infrastructure development in East and Southeast Asia. While much of the existing literature attributes these developmental successes to state-capitalism and highly-centralized governance, we argue that such explanations risk overlooking the institutional and technocratic arrangements that enabled policy implementation on the ground. Through a focus on the Chinese electricity sector, we examine how engineers, economists, planners, and policymakers collectively translated national sectoral goals into coordinated infrastructural outcomes. Drawing from disciplines including history, economics, planning, and political ecology, we examine how configurations of state, expertise, and labor enabled the expansion of critical infrastructure and supported the rise of East and Southeast Asian countries in the global economy.
We will conduct a case study on China’s electricity system, from the Reform and Opening period to present-day efforts in decarbonization and electricity market liberalization. We will hold monthly expert roundtables with practitioners from institutions like LBNL, ERG, and Berkeley’s California-China Climate Institute. These interviews will be recorded, coded using MAXQDA, and analyzed collaboratively by our student team. Our goal is to develop alternative theoretical frameworks that move beyond state-capitalist and regime-type explanations and better capture the role of expert networks in sectoral planning. This project offers timely insights for liberal democracies currently embracing industrial policy, by drawing lessons from Asia’s developmental states on how to cultivate and deploy expertise to meet strategic infrastructure goals.

Embodied: Critical Logistics and Empire Research Team

Team lead: Ajung Ryoo, PhD student, Department of Anthropology

The question at the heart of our research team is: How can global capitalism—a system propped up by logistics and technology—be made comprehensible? On the one hand, these systems are ideologically presented as historically inevitable and necessary. On the other, capitalism appears unintelligible, ambiguous, nonsensical, labyrinthine; it presents itself in different languages, shapes and mediums, and it seems impossible to grasp or battle such a shapeshifting force. Therefore, instead of attempting the impossible project of mapping out capitalism into a holistic picture, we attempt to locate or assemble the shifting openings, cracks, chokepoints, spillages, or leaks, which undo and warp the demarcated boundaries between bodies, nations, and capital which are continuously enforced by colonial, ideological, and corporate empires. In short, we will attend to palpable, embodied experiences in specifically situated conditions to make intelligible the ever-evolving, multi-headed figure of global capitalism and logistical networks that shape our lives with overwhelming force.

La Colectiva

Team leads: Michelle Zaragoza, PhD student, School of Social Welfare; Jimena Perez, PhD student, Department of Geography

La Colectiva grapples with navigating the sociopolitical and cultural dimensions of the academic terrain as Latinx graduate students and theorizing and making sense of our multiple positions as scholars, researchers, practitioners, educators, healers, and members of our communities. While the representation of Latinx students at Berkeley has increased over the past couple of years, as of 2024, Berkeley does not yet meet the criteria for an HSI designation, and many Latinx students are disproportionately affected by campus climate, food insecurity, and mental health (UC Berkeley UCUES, 2020). However, what remains absent is an interdisciplinary space within Berkeley that supports Latinx students with their creative and community-engaged methodological training and scholarship, and that makes space for grappling with the psycho-emotional toll of academia that graduate students face. La Colectiva turns to testimonios (personal narratives) to elucidate individual and collective narratives of challenge, resistance, empowerment, and transformation. This embodied theory of transformation is the foundation of our group. La Colectiva focuses on the central question: What methodological frameworks enable us to coexist, embracing our intersecting identities instead of separating our emotions from our research?

Farmworker Justice Research Team

Team lead: Alina Leticia Zárate, PhD student, Energy and Resources Group

Farmworkers make up one of the most vulnerable labor forces in the United States despite their essential role within the agricultural industry. Due to the various social, political, and environmental challenges they face, farmworkers have traditionally been studied in various disciplines focused on segmented aspects of their experience. While informative, little work has been conducted to synthesize these various disciplinary findings. As a result, our research addresses the following questions: (1) What are the major disciplines and topics that make up farmworker research? (2) What are the major contributions of this research, and what methods do they employ? (3) How can these contributions be combined to create a farmworker justice framework that provides a more comprehensive and holistic understanding of farmworker vulnerabilities, thus informing future research efforts and policy developments? Through an extensive interdisciplinary review we seek to develop a farmworker justice framework that can inform future research and policy interventions concerning agricultural laborers.

Contours of Techno-Authoritarianism

Team leads: Jillian (Lee) Crandall, PhD Student, Department of Geography, Designated Emphasis in New Media & STS

This research group aims to study the critical intersection between technology, politics, power, and space in the 21st century. Specifically, we aim to better understand the rise of cyberlibertarianism, venture capital extremism, secessionism, and techno-fascism/techno-authoritarianism. With roots in Silicon Valley’s “build fast and break things” logic of technological innovation, democracy is now seen by some tech-venture capitalists as an outdated technology to be replaced with algorithmic decision-making and private technological governance solutions. These accelerationist logics are posed to concentrate power for VC tech elites and threaten the freedoms, lands, and lives of marginalized populations on the grounds of race, gender, and sexuality. With this, the Contours of Techno-Authoritarianism Research Group will center on the following: how media and flows of information are controlled; how anti/post-state development intersects with far-right extremist ideologies; how they have moved from fringe to mainstream; and how these ideologies are being made concrete with technical infrastructures such as AI, blockchain, and cryptocurrency. This research will make connections between histories of technology and fascism, drawing from critical theory and the Frankfurt School, social theory on crowds, and contemporary scholarship on tech-libertarianism and politics of exit/secession. We hope to intersect the critical social sciences with political economy, political science, history, literature, computer science, new media, language, and rhetoric. As this research group is future-thinking and praxis-oriented, we will also explore strategies of resistance movements and democratic interventions which may help inform and connect across scholar-activist lines.

Matrix News

Matrix Welcomes Seven Research Teams for 2024-2025

Published August 5, 2024

Social Science Matrix will welcome seven new Matrix Research Teams for the 2024-2025 academic year. Matrix Research Teams are groups of scholars who gather regularly to explore or develop a novel question or emerging field in the social sciences. The teams convene participants from multiple disciplines and focus on research questions with real-world significance; they are designed to encourage collaboration among graduate students, provide professional development, and create opportunities for faculty engagement and mentorship.

This year’s funded teams — three faculty-led team and four graduate student-led teams — will address diverse social science topics, including industrial policy, computational social science, data mining and algorithms, and the language of biomedicine.

“The research teams are the heart and soul of Matrix,” says Marion Fourcade, Professor of Sociology and Faculty Director of Social Science Matrix. “Like their predecessors, the scholars receiving our funding for 2024-25 are poised to push boundaries with their innovative research while cultivating cross-disciplinary partnerships across the university. We take great pride in supporting their research.”

Below are summaries describing the 2024-2025 Matrix Research Teams, based on the teams’ proposals.

Faculty-Led Research Teams

The Case of the Human: A Transdisciplinary Research Team

Team leaders: Seth Holmes, Chancellor’s Professor, Medical Anthropology; Jeremy Gottlieb, MD/PhD student, Medical Anthropology; Theo Michaels, MD/PhD student, Medical Anthropology

Between the social sciences and medicine there exist numerous definitions of the human, from varying perspectives and with different political implications. Critical knowledge produced by the social sciences has engendered new terminology, programs, and practices in medicine that elucidate the social inequities in health and health care. While it is clear that the social sciences should be integral to medicine, the social sciences continue to vary in their understandings of “the human” in relation to health. The Case of the Human follows this importance and difference. We ask: “What do the social sciences bring to medicine’s conceptualization of ‘the human’? And how is the category of the human acted on in the sphere of health and health care?”

We answer these questions by generating novel, interdisciplinary, and diverse knowledge on the human along three important axes: the human as body, as social, and as subject. We bring together a community of scholars from across the social sciences in the service of our three key aims, each involving specific outputs: 1) co-developing knowledge on the human, through a multidisciplinary research conference co-sponsored by our UC-Berkeley Social Science Matrix Research Team; 2) disseminating new social scientific knowledges on the human, through a collaborative case series published in The Lancet; and 3) fostering an interdisciplinary community of social scientific scholars engaged in questions of the human, health, and medicine. Our multidisciplinary approach promises to transcend the boundaries separating the different social sciences, as well as the social sciences and health.

Computational Social Science Research Team

Team leaders: David Harding, Professor of Sociology; Philip Stark, Professor of Statistics

The Computational Social Science Research Team will bring together faculty, graduate students, and other researchers from both social science and data science disciplines (e.g. Statistics, Computer Science) to explore potential strategies for further developing computational social science research and graduate training at UC Berkeley. The nascent field of computational social science encompasses research on social science research questions that leverages computational methods and resources, from machine learning to natural language processing to network analysis to “big data” and beyond. Computational social science also involves the consideration of the ethical and social implications of the use of artificial intelligence and big data for research, policy, and commerce.

Our Matrix Research Team has the following three interrelated goals that will create lasting impact at UC Berkeley and beyond: (1) Build a multidisciplinary community with the capacity to communicate and collaborate across fields; (2) Identify collaborative research projects for development of external funding applications; and (3) Design a “Designated Emphasis” (DE) in Computational Social Science for PhD students at Berkeley. We will accomplish these goals through weekly team meetings, informed by a regular external speaker series.

Blockchain Information flows in the digital global networks. 3D illustration of data cells with binary code elements.

The Social Effects and Normativity of Data-Mining, Algorithms and the Digital Economy Research Team

Team leaders: Sarah Song, the Milo Rees Robbins Chair in Legal Ethics Professor of Law, Professor of Philosophy and Political Science; Isabella Luisa Mariani, Graduate Student, Jurisprudence and Social Policy, Berkeley Law

The digital economy has penetrated nearly every aspect of our social and political lives. Our research seeks to examine the effects of this prolific phenomenon on our social and personal development, our ability to access basic needs like healthcare, and our political and legal institutions and culture. Specifically, we will examine the connection between data mining and algorithmic systems integral to online platforms with outcomes across public and private sectors. These sectors include private health insurance, online esports, marketing, and political and legal discourse.

We seek to understand what the mining of personal data and the construction of algorithms (including predictive algorithms) mean for our political community, considering issues of political radicalization, social and emotional development, access to basic needs, and epistemic and political rights such as freedom of speech and privacy.

Our approach is interdisciplinary in that we consider perspectives from Sociology, Political Science, Law, Philosophy, and Political Economy to address the social, political, and normative implications of the digital economy. Weaving these perspectives and their respective methodologies will enable us to grapple with the vast effects of the rise of digitality and the exploitation of personal data that sustains the digital economy, and what potential solutions private actors, politicians, and lawmakers have to address them.

Student-Led Teams

Industrial Policy Research Team

Team leaders: Ari Benkler, PhD student, Political Science; Lucas Osborne, PhD student, Jurisprudence and Social Policy; Sarang Shah, PhD student, Political Science.

Industrial policy is an interdisciplinary policymaking approach that instrumentalizes specific markets as mechanisms for achieving economic and political outcomes. Effective industrial policies make constructive use of findings from sociology, political science, economics, law, and other fields to plot the feedback between and co-constitution of the state and markets. An interdisciplinary approach could potentially transform this field by weaving the threads of diverse disciplines, and their analytical frameworks and methods, into a tighter, more cohesive, and more targeted bundle. Industrial policymaking is more than a subject of disciplinary study, but potentially a site for disciplinary formation around specific policy areas, such as climate change or housing. There may be opportunities in iterating on novel approaches and methodologies by synthesizing and applying the various disciplinary contributions. The aim of this research space is to bring useful contributions to the space of governance at a time in which the challenges we may address in doing so has never been more urgent.

Legal Geography Research Team

Team leaders: Andrea Lara-Garcia, PhD student, Geography; and Ralph Madlalate, PhD student, Jurisprudence and Social Policy

Contemporary social challenges such as widespread evictions, border militarization, migration and global climate change highlight the interconnections between legal ordering and spatial phenomena in shaping societal outcomes. In this context the boundaries between law, geography, and other disciplines continues to blur; such that there is a growing need to understand the complex interplay between legal frameworks, social relations, and geographical landscapes.

This research team aims to bring together graduate students from various fields, including law, urban planning, geography, and beyond, to foster a vibrant exchange of ideas on contemporary spatial and legal challenges. By delving into the intersection of law and geography–both through analyzing classical and foundational texts as well as drawing on critical perspectives in postcolonial studies, feminist geographies, and critical legal studies–we aim to uncover new perspectives, challenge conventional wisdom, and chart innovative pathways for research and scholarship. Our inquiry is motivated by the recognition that legal frameworks are not neutral instruments of governance, but are embedded within broader social, spatial, and economic contexts that (re)produce injustice. Ultimately, we believe that by critically interrogating the spatial dimensions of law, we can contribute to efforts aimed at creating more just, equitable, and inclusive spaces for all.

Tox-Ecologies Collective Research Team

Team leaders: Jasmine Martin, PhD student, Geography; Jimena Perez, PhD student, Geography

The Tox-Ecologies Collective grapples with the enduring legacies of colonialism and capitalism, the continued uneven restructuring of our material and relational worlds, and the altered forms of life and sociality that emerge within these affected spaces (Murphy, 2017). We turn to methodology to find the “words, protocols, and methods that might honor the inseparability of bodies and land, and at the same time grapple with the expansive chemical relations” (Murphy, 2017). Since the late 2000s, epistemological and theoretical interventions across critical disability studies, Indigenous STS, and racial geographies have catalyzed new ways of seeing ourselves and toxins and have provided new grammars for understanding and narrating environmental harm, which in turn has offered more creative horizons of possibility. Our group aims to trace these interventions, as well as find new language and analytic methods to think through our ecological entanglements—beyond a mathematics of damage and a framework that still holds out hope for an uncontaminated future. How we study relational entanglements influences what political demands we make and what obligations we have to each other (Thomas, 2019; Liboiron, 2021b). The Tox-Ecologies Collective is invested in asking what methods might be used to attend to how contamination and pollution alters our bodies and worlds and what new relations are made possible when we develop new analytic frames to understand our contemporary planetary conditions. The Collective’s activities include: a year-long reading and methods-practice group; a Spring 2025 writing workshop with the goal of a published, collaborative paper; and a Spring 2025 Symposium.

The Zones of Incommunicability and Biomedicine Research Team

Team leaders: Mark Williams Jr., PhD student, Medical Anthropology

It’s time to start over. Our is world saturated with toxic discourses on what it means to be healthy, what constitutes acceptable forms of care, and how to gain access to it. The interplay between language, health, and biomedicine has significant implications for public health outcomes, community development, and individual growth. Increasingly this has meant that everyday forms of communication, whether mundane or spectacular, have become potent sites of life and death. The Zones of Incommunicability and Biomedicine Research Team seeks to analyze how linguistic practices and biomedical knowledge come together to shape health behaviors, policies, and forms of care for some populations while constructing others as unworthy of it. We come together as medical anthropologists, linguists, public health researchers, artists, physicians, journalists and scholars in education, disability studies, black studies, and education to shed light on the power dynamics and cultural narratives that undergird the health and biomedical landscape. We track how language and communication within and outside of biomedical contexts influence the political economy of health resources and services, the experience of patients and practitioners, and broader social understandings of health, illness, and well-being. As a team we seek to launch an experimental, collective effort to radically recast old tools and create new ones that tinker with the conceptual building blocks of language, communication, poetics, interaction, narrative, translation, mediatization, health, and medicine, using them as provocations for unlearning and creating a radically decolonial framework.

Matrix News

Matrix Announces 2023-2024 Research Teams

Published August 30, 2023

Social Science Matrix is excited to welcome five new Matrix Research Teams for the 2023-2024 academic year. Matrix Research Teams are groups of scholars who gather regularly to explore or develop a novel question or emerging field in the social sciences. The teams convene participants from multiple disciplines and focus on research questions with real-world significance; they are designed to encourage collaboration among graduate students, provide professional development, and create opportunities for faculty engagement and mentorship.

This year’s funded teams — one faculty-led team and four graduate student-led teams — will address a diverse range of social science questions, including understanding the effects of the US military presence on the Marianas archipelago; examining the influence of Frantz Fanon on scholarship about decolonization, anti-colonialism, and liberation; researching the infrastructural projects built by prisoners in the United States; investigating the legacies of Black campus members at UC Berkeley since the university’s founding; and examining the processes through which cities in Latin America have been constructed and imagined.

“These teams are doing phenomenal work,” said Marion Fourcade, Director of Social Science Matrix and Professor of Sociology. “They are both crafting innovative research agendas and fostering community with fellow scholars from across campus. We are so proud to host and fund them.”

In addition to funding, all Matrix Research Teams receive support in coordinating, scheduling, and reserving space for meetings and events. Matrix also provides communications support to help publicize each group’s work, as well as assistance with identifying and applying for further funding. Below are summaries describing the 2023-2024 Matrix Research Teams, based on the teams’ proposals.

Faculty-Led Research Teams

Marianas Critical Research Initiative

Organizer: Clancy Wilmott, Assistant Professor in Critical Cartography, Geovisualisation, and Design in the Berkeley Centre for New Media and the Department of Geography

Over the past two decades, US military plans for the Marianas archipelago (mandatorily released to the public in compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act) have detailed enormous infrastructure expansions that risk contaminating the islands’ soil, drinking water, and fragile coral reef ecosystems. Critics of these plans also point out that proposed training ranges promise to physically destroy sacred cultural sites, damage the archipelago’s tourism-based economy, and increase travel and shipping costs by restricting air and sea space during training exercises. Local non-profit organizations, lawyers, environmental scientists, politicians, artists, and activists have responded to these perceived threats to their health, environment, culture, and way of life with a barrage of protests, lawsuits, and appeals to the US federal government and United Nations.

The Marianas Critical Research Initiative (MCRI) is a diverse coalition of UC Berkeley faculty and graduate students interested in examining the detrimental effects that US military presence has had on environmental and human health in the Marianas from WWII to the present. With heritage and familial ties across the Pacific, the MCRI team is dedicated to achieving and bolstering understanding of this under-studied conflict, taking an interdisciplinary approach to the topic by integrating critical military studies, security studies, political ecology, geography, indigenous studies, public health, veteran studies, and questions of sovereignty and colonialism in US territories.

Student-Led Research Teams

The Afterlives of Fanon Research Collective

Organizers: Adam Hasan, Graduate Student, UC Berkeley Department of Geography, Black Geographies Collective; Sibahle Ndwayana, UC Berkeley Department of Geography, Black Geographies Collective

Anticolonial intellectual and activist Frantz Fanon’s influences have inspired the work of liberation movements worldwide and continue to generate robust cross-disciplinary debate by scholars across the humanities, social sciences, and medical fields. The Afterlives of Fanon Research Collective aims to provide an institutional home for graduate scholarship on decolonization, anti-colonialism, and liberation at Berkeley and the broader Bay Area, providing a space to think with Fanon’s work and its afterlives through an interdisciplinary geographic lens. We aim to understand Fanon’s contributions in relation to the realities he faced and, most importantly, fold them in with other intellectuals and activists’ contexts, i.e., trying to understand his work in relation to our realities. Using analytical frameworks from interdisciplinary fields, including Black geographies, postcolonial studies, gender studies, and medical anthropology, the Collective grounds our thinking, writing, and practice in concrete historical and geographic contexts where Fanon’s work has been taken up and stretched in new directions. In a world increasingly defined by violent hostility to historically marginalized communities and people, the urgent relevance of Fanon’s work on liberation extends beyond the confines of the academy. To this end, the Collective fosters conversations that cross not only disciplinary boundaries but also the boundaries of the academy itself. The Collective’s goals include four primary programmatic areas: a year-long, bi-weekly graduate student reading group; a one time faculty colloquium guest talk; a second-semester graduate working paper series with the intended goal of an edited volume; and a public-facing film series curated in collaboration with BAMPFA.

Carceral Labor Mapping Project

Organizers: Elizabeth Hargrett, PhD Candidate, Department of History; Xander Lenc, PhD Candidate, Department of Geography

The American landscape has been profoundly shaped by the labor and toil of incarcerated workers, but most of us pass by the highways, dams, forests, parks, and other landforms they built without any inkling of their carceral origins. There is no central database for the tens of thousands of infrastructural projects built by prisoners in the United States, and despite a wealth of disparate scholarship on prison and jail labor there is no collaborative platform for historians, geographers, sociologists, and other scholars of the prison to circulate their findings. The Carceral Labor Mapping Project (CLMP, or “Clamp”) aims to foster collaboration between carceral scholars and provide pedagogical tools for educators seeking to demystify the carceral landscape. The team will produce an online GIS platform allowing users to not only learn about the role that carceral labor programs have played in shaping the world around them, but also allowing them to collaborate on carceral research projects.

Black Lives at Cal Initiative

Organizers: Caleb Dawson, PhD candidate, Critical Studies of Race, Class, and Gender, Berkeley School of Education; Nitoshia Ford, PhD student, Department of African American Studies; Kevin Steward, JD Candidate, Berkeley Law School; Bria Suggs, graduate student, UC Berkeley School of Journalism

Black Lives at Cal (BLAC) is a long-awaited initiative to celebrate, defend, and advance the legacy of Black students, faculty, staff, and alumni at the University of California Berkeley. As a multi-year research endeavor, BLAC investigates the lived experiences, struggles, and accomplishments of Black campus members (BCM) since the university’s founding with balanced attention to individuals, informal collectives, organizations, and campus units. Yet BLAC is more than a research endeavor. BLAC is dedicated to developing novel ways to preserve and publicize these legacies such as a website and interactive visuals (e.g. timeline, maps, exhibits). Our commitment to celebrating, defending, and advancing our legacy of Black life-making follows from and extends the three characteristics of Black Studies put forward by Manning Marable – to be descriptive, corrective, and prescriptive. First, we believe that a detailed description of the legacy of the Black campus community in the face of institutional disdain, disrespect, and neglect lends itself to a celebration. Second, we are all too familiar with what the Black Women Collective critiques as the academy’s impetus to erase, misrepresent, and generally appropriate our legacies of Black (women’s) cultural production in service of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, so BLAC offers a corrective to those majoritarian histories in defense of our interests and self-definition. Finally, we believe that careful engagement with the past and present can prescribe, or inform, how we relate to the future in such a way that cultivates our advancement.

Latin American Cities

Organizers: Isabel Peñaranda Currie, PhD Student, City and Regional Planning, UC Berkeley; Flavia Leite, PhD Student, City and Regional Planning, UC Berkeley; Laura Belik, PhD Candidate, Architecture, UC Berkeley.

With over 80% of its population living in urban centers, Latin America is the most urbanized region in the world. Yet even within a single city, the continent’s urban contexts provide an infinite diversity of realities that have been understood through a spectrum of ideas, movements, and constructions. The Latin American Cities (LAC) Working Group was created to examine the complex transdisciplinary processes through which cities in the continent have been constructed and imagined, and explore the challenges they face in the current age. Our goal is to reflect on the urban context in Latin America through various integrative lenses and approaches of research. How can we understand Latin America’s regionality? While we recognize the common historical, cultural, political and economic connections between the different territories and countries, this group also aims to challenge the totalizing approach towards urban theory and planning. In order to do so, we will try to understand the representations of the urban form found in various works across diverse fields of study, giving a more textured account of how the city is lived and imagined through distinct analytic lenses. We aim to bring together interdisciplinary perspectives to deepen our understanding of urban spaces and urban cultures throughout Latin America, as well as to broaden the dialogue between Latin America and other regions in the Global South.

Matrix News

Matrix Announces Research Teams for 2022-2023

Published August 17, 2022

Six interdisciplinary teams will explore emerging research questions.

What are the processes of radicalization that lead to mass violence and genocide? How could digital mapping be used for advocacy, sovereignty, and decolonization? What are the psycho-social implications of sea-level rise and climate change for communities?

These are among the questions to be explored by six new Matrix Research Teams during the 2022-2023 academic year. Matrix Research Teams are groups of scholars who gather regularly to explore or develop a novel question or emerging field in the social sciences. The teams convene participants from multiple disciplines, and focus on research questions with real-world significance; they are designed to encourage collaboration among graduate students, provide professional development, and create opportunities for faculty engagement and mentorship.

“We are pleased to welcome these new Matrix Research Teams, all of which are studying vital questions that span social-scientific disciplines,” says Marion Fourcade, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley and Director of Social Science Matrix. “Research teams are central to Matrix’s mission of promoting cross-disciplinary collaboration. We look forward to working with and supporting these groups over the coming academic year.”

This year’s funded teams — three faculty-led teams and three student-led teams — were chosen following review by a cross-disciplinary panel of faculty members. Faculty-led teams receive $5000 in funding and hold regular meetings focused on a defined research problem, with a goal to apply for one or more grants for continued research. The student-led teams will receive up to $1500 to explore a new area or question of inquiry, in part to assess whether it has potential for further investigation.

In addition to funding, all Matrix Research Teams receive support in coordinating, scheduling, and reserving space for meetings and events. Matrix also provides communications support to help publicize each group’s work, as well as assistance with identifying and applying for further funding. Below are summaries describing the 2021-2022 Matrix Research Teams, based on the teams’ proposals

Faculty-Led Teams

Cumulative Radicalization: New Models of Mass Violence

Team Organizers: Robert Braun and Scott Straus
Disciplines: Anthropology, economics, history, political science, sociology

Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. Photo by Michael Fousert on Unsplash

How and why do policies of mass violence and genocide emerge? This Matrix Research Team seeks to leverage the specialization of social scientists at UC Berkeley to develop fresh answers to this critical question.

A long-standing observation in scholarship on mass violence across the social sciences is that elite decision-making is processual. This agreement on the processual nature of mass violence notwithstanding, models for how this actually works remain opaque. The most extensive scholarship exists for the Holocaust, where historians developed the idea of cumulative radicalization. The approach suggests that, informed by animating but ultimately somewhat vague ideas from the Nazi leadership, local officials interpreted instructions, competed with their peers, and invented policies of violence in the field. Central authorities in turn affirmed and encouraged these levels of violence.

This Matrix project seeks to build on this insight through three key questions: First, how does this model of cumulative radicalization work for other cases of genocide? Second, how can the burgeoning literature on political violence in sociology and political violence provide insight into these escalation processes? And third, can the notion of cumulative radicalization taken from Holocaust studies help overcome the generalizability and aggregation crises which are currently haunting scholarship on political violence more broadly?

The culmination will be a one-day workshop in April, held at Matrix, featuring speakers who can speak to the comparative genocide dimensions (e.g. scholars of Cambodia, China, Bosnia, and other cases) as well as to the political violence literature. The team seeks to develop the papers from the workshop into a special issue of an academic journal.

Deorienting the Map: Alternative Cartographies for Alternative Futures

Team Organizer: Clancy Wilmott

Disciplines: New media, Indigenous geographies, political science, geography, software engineering/design, cartography, development studies, environmental science, geomorphology, geology, traditional ecological knowledges

satellite map — Satellite map. Photo by USGS on Unsplash

Deorienting the Map is a Matrix Research Team that aims to explore the possibilities and limitations of reimagining an open source, user-focused geographic information system based on the principles of decolonization, anti-racism, accessibility, localization, and sovereignty. A combination of faculty and graduate students, the team will explore the histories and legacies of colonial cartographic and geographic information science, with emphasis on ideas and resistance to colonial thinking that have emerged in Indigenous spatial philosophies from across the world, through mapping, storytelling and “savage philosophy” (Braken, 2007).

Digital mapping is necessarily interdisciplinary, and this research team brings together a cross-disciplinary set of researchers, with a view to building further networks beyond the social sciences. The researchers will use the funding to establish a research team to read, research and seek collaborators and design a funding application for an interdisciplinary research workshop to establish connections between different disciplines and stakeholders (including community groups, academics, and engineers). The aims of this workshop are to ask if — and if so, how — could we reimagine digital mapping as a tool for advocacy, sovereignty, and decolonization beyond the superficial data layer of the map, and into the cartography itself. This includes questions of projection and orientation, toponymy, and language; feature generalization and attributes; as well as sovereignty, decolonization, and reclamation.

Local Communities in Context: Case Studies in Early China

Team Organizer: Michael Nylan

Disciplines: comparativist history, political science

Part of the Shuihudi Qin bamboo texts, in the China Audit Museum in Nantong. Image by 猫猫的日记本

The problem of local communities and associations is both understudied and ill-studied in the Early China field. This faculty-led Matrix Research Team will conduct an in-depth study of recently excavated manuscripts, focusing on five sites, where the site reports and transcriptions suffice to sketch the operations of local communities that are part of the administration of the early empires, in regions far from the capital with mixed ethnicities.

The goal of the project is to produce a small handbook of translations, each equipped with brief background essays explaining the document’s significance, that will be as useful for non-specialists in the class and conference rooms, as for fellow China experts. Few people can even read such documents, let alone explain them in light of local conditions, and so the team’s goal in the first semester is to translate as many of them as possible, with due care. The team’s work will be a first-of-its-kind effort to correlate findings across the geographic map of the early empires in China, contrasting and comparing evidence culled from the “outer provinces” of the northwest, northeast, southeast, and southwest.

Student-Led Teams

Marx and The City Research Team: Land and Housing

rows of colorful houses — Photo by Breno Assis on Unsplash

Team Organizers: Beki McElvain, Alex Ramiller, and Laura Schmahmann
Disciplines: Political economy, urban theory, urban planning, Marxist theory

Organized by a group of graduate students from the UC Berkeley Department of City and Regional Planning, this Matrix Research Team will provide an inclusive, inter-disciplinary intellectual space for thinking through Marxian political economic theory and engaging with texts focused on the topic “land and housing.” The purpose is to bring together interdisciplinary understandings of Marxian political economy, urban theory, and practical urban issues across disciplines.

This focus has been identified by the group coordinators as an important field of inquiry in understanding the application of Marxian frame-works to contemporary society, particularly one in which land and housing are increasingly financialized. For example, do markets for land and housing primarily serve as markets for production or as markets for consumption under a capitalist system? How do Marxian concepts apply when talking about contemporary forms of homeownership? How can Marx’s viewpoints on agricultural land rent be reconciled with uses of land in urban areas? The research team will be open to anyone engaging with these ideas in their own social science scholarship through regularly scheduled reading workshops and invited speaker events.

Psychological Borderlands: Landscape Transformation and Environmental Ethics on the Margins of Ecological Change

Team Organizer: Kelly Leilani Main
Disciplines: landscape architecture, environmental planning, geography, civil & environmental engineering, anthropology

traffic sign immersed in flood waters — Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

In light of increasingly dire reports from the IPCC of irreversible climate impacts poised to wreak havoc on human systems and the non-human environments upon which they depend, this research aims to investigate the multidisciplinary nexus of ecological devastation, fossil fuel economies, social health, and place-based relations in the context of rapid environmental transformation. The primary goal is to investigate the intertwined social-technical problems presented by sea level rise and land ownership to wetlands located near industrial or contaminated sites and the psycho-social implications for communities faced with environmental change.

This goal is interdisciplinary by nature, weaving together multi-dimensional social research with the science of landscape change. In particular, each of the four participants will share a case study from their ongoing doctoral research along with a set of suggested readings on a monthly basis. While all the participants research infrastructures, spatial transformation, or restoration, and the intersections with climate change, they do so from very different disciplinary (and thus methodological and theoretical) perspectives that span engineering, anthropology, law, geography, and landscape architecture.

Digital Harms and Impact

Team Organizer: Ji Su Yoo
Disciplines: Information, cybersecurity, public policy

etched GPU — Fritzchens Fritz / Better Images of AI / GPU shot etched 5 / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0

Digital and online harms have recently been brought to the forefront of public discourse given the role of technology companies in facilitating and even causing harm to marginalized and vulnerable populations such as children, teens, people with disabilities, stigmatized identities, and protected groups. Digital harms can (1) happen online, (2) be instigated online and lead to in-person harm, (3) incite violence and harm offline, and (4) last longer than one instance of harm. The repercussions are significant, both in social and public life, because of the massive scale and intensity that these harms can have on individuals, communities, and society.

This Matrix Research Team will examine the impact of digital harms, violence, and trauma, including how frameworks of justice should inform our approach to addressing different forms and manifestations of interpersonal and structural harms. They are also interested in how harm can be obscured by algorithms and data-driven policies to maintain and reify power. The team’s members, largely from the UC Berkeley School of Information, are all tackling a dimension of this research area, including examinations of algorithmic harms, mitigation tools, consumer protection, surveillance, housing displacement, misinformation, and humanitarian efforts. They are developing creative ways to address the issue and useful ways to publicly communicate how these harms present themselves on multiple levels and in multiple contexts.